On a misty April morning in Lower Manhattan, the Danish architect Bjarke Ingels stood on the roof of an old brick building, the collar of his black coat rakishly popped, shooting a promotional film for the defining commission of his career. At 40 years old, he was tasked with designing the skyscraper known as Two World Trade Center. It was still very much a work in progress, and his primary client—media magnate Rupert Murdoch—had yet to formally sign off on the plans.
Yet, the hyper-eloquent architect did not let doubt stand in the way of his vision. Having obsessed over every line and image, he told his director that he wanted viewers to swoon. At the time, Murdoch’s plan to relocate his corporate empire was one of New York real estate’s most closely guarded secrets, but Ingels was ready to shout the news from the rooftops. Between takes, he pointed to an empty space in the densely packed Manhattan skyline, tracing the profile of a skyscraper only he could see.
From this perspective, Ingels’s design resembled a stack of seven distinct blocks, ascending like a staircase toward One World Trade Center, its monolithic neighbor. "In a way, it is almost like a physical manifestation of the spirit of America," he said, invoking the national motto: "Out of many, one."
If completed, the tower would stand among the tallest buildings in New York City and mark the final piece of the master plan for the redeveloped World Trade Center site. The ensemble was designed to ring two cascading pools paying tribute to the roughly 3,000 victims of the September 11 terrorist attacks. But Ingels was not overly preoccupied with the tragedy of the past; he wanted to make his own history. "The memorial is about the memorial," he noted. "The tower should be about the living city."
Eclecticism on Demand
Ingels is fond of describing architecture as "the art of turning fiction into fact." He possesses a rare mix of talents—as a draftsman, a master salesman, and a charming cultivator of his own winning public image. However, his greatest asset remains a formidable gift for storytelling: the ability to construct a compelling narrative around practical necessities. Often, his designs careen in fantastical directions.
At the time, he was constructing a waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen featuring a slanted roof designed to double as a recreational ski slope, complete with a smokestack engineered to puff a symbolic ring of steam each time it emitted a ton of carbon dioxide. For a proposed expansion of Google’s campus in Mountain View, California, Ingels—collaborating with Thomas Heatherwick—conceived a wildly elaborate complex of geodesic domes, envisioning a lifestyle of biking, hiking, and coding beneath a sunlit glass terrarium.
Such imaginative flights had made Ingels famous, and highly sought-after, at an age considered remarkably precocious by architectural standards. But fame in his profession can be deceptive; an architect’s work, much like the light of a star, often reaches the public eye only after a grueling, years-long journey.
Ingels’s largest completed project in New York at the time—a striking pyramidal apartment building along the West Side Highway at 57th Street known as Via 57 West—was roughly one-third the size of Two World Trade Center. "At the moment we are working seriously on one of the most daunting buildings in downtown New York," Ingels acknowledged, noting the sobering reality that he had yet to complete a single skyscraper. With Two World Trade Center, he believed he had discovered a way to reinvent the high-rise work environment, transforming a structure that is fundamentally vertical and hierarchical into a hub for horizontal interaction.
To realize his design, however, Ingels continually had to prove its value to a pair of hard-nosed octogenarians: Rupert Murdoch and Larry Silverstein, the developer controlling much of the World Trade Center rebuilding effort. Murdoch and Silverstein still needed to finalize a long-term lease to make the $4 billion skyscraper financially viable. "There’s a lot of drama with the deal right now," Ingels remarked on the day of his film shoot. "I don’t know how worried I should be."
Even with an agreement, severe hazards loomed: a volatile real estate market, the political melodrama inherent in building on a site of mass tragedy, and the bureaucratic hurdles of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the transportation agency owning the land beneath the complex. For 14 years, these forces had kept the redevelopment process lurching unpredictably, dashing many an architectural ambition. In fact, Ingels’s design had displaced an earlier one by Lord Norman Foster. To avoid a similar fate, Ingels had to balance the conflicting demands of Murdoch and Silverstein while juggling a rapidly expanding portfolio of high-profile global clients.
Navigating Power Brokers and Structural Realities
The first major force Ingels had to overcome at the World Trade Center site was institutional inertia. Silverstein was initially content with Foster’s existing design and harbored serious reservations about Ingels’s early drawings, fearing the stacked structure would look asymmetrical or teetering from certain angles. Silverstein nearly rejected the deal altogether before receiving reassurances from architects working on other Trade Center buildings.
Shortly after, Ingels faced a high-stakes review with Rupert Murdoch himself. Gathering in a conference room overlooking the site, Ingels was momentarily thrown off balance by the Australian media mogul’s rapid-fire questioning. Murdoch’s central concern was direct and pragmatic: Why doesn’t it fall over? With assistance from David Childs, the architect of One World Trade Center, Ingels explained that the leaning effect was an optical illusion. The unorthodox stepped form resulted from placing the elevator core off-center, creating expansive interior spaces for newsrooms, outdoor terraces, and sweeping views of the plaza for Fox News studios. Murdoch was ultimately convinced.
Ingels also counted on a crucial internal ally: James Murdoch, Rupert’s son and corporate heir apparent. As the driving force behind the relocation of 21st Century Fox and News Corp. from an aging building near Rockefeller Center, the younger Murdoch sought an open, loftlike workspace rather than a traditional corporate tower. "We were struck by what a great problem solver he was," James Murdoch said. "This is someone who can take a set of constraints and create something surprising and effective out of them."
Yet, significant constraints remained, rooted primarily in the remnants of Foster’s unfinished foundation, which had already been constructed to accommodate a $4 billion underground transportation hub. Piggybacking a new skyscraper onto preexisting subterranean supports created complex structural hurdles.
Ten days after meeting with Murdoch, Ingels faced a reality check from his project manager, Ute Rinnebach, who reported that underground retrofitting plans encroaching on the Port Authority’s domain were forbidden. Altering those reinforced walls, likened to removing a block from a Jenga tower, could jeopardize the entire structural integrity. Furthermore, a facade consultant delivered another blow: New York Police Department security standards mandated that all facades at the World Trade Center use heavy laminated safety glass, ruling out thinner, less expensive materials Ingels had hoped would offset rising costs.
As negotiations between Silverstein and Murdoch grew tense, any departure from standard architectural formulas drove up construction estimates. "Right now," Ingels admitted, "the architecture is essentially held hostage."
Evolving Through Constraints
Despite weeks of uncertainty and agonizing structural revisions, Ingels managed to salvage the core concept of his design. Walking the World Trade Center plaza with project executives, he received praise from Janno Lieber, Silverstein’s top deputy, who commended the team’s rapid turnaround.
Ingels viewed these setbacks not as failures, but as evolutionary catalysts. Comparing the process to Darwinian survival, he noted that moments of crisis often force designers down entirely new paths. "In architecture," he reflected, "sometimes the eureka moment is actually when you give up a stance and say, OK, we have to try something else."
This philosophy was borne out by his broader body of work. Having founded BIG in Copenhagen a decade prior, Ingels had bypassed the traditional slow-growth trajectory of the architectural avant-garde. From designing the innovative Amager Bakke waste-to-energy plant with its rooftop ski slope in Denmark, to master-planning the Smithsonian’s South Mall campus in Washington, D.C., and conceiving the Dryline coastal flood defense system in New York, BIG’s footprint was expanding rapidly.
By June, a tentative lease agreement between Silverstein and Murdoch was finally reached, allowing the public unveiling of the Two World Trade Center design. Before the announcement, Ingels sought a final blessing from Daniel Libeskind, the original master planner of the World Trade Center site. Standing before a glowing physical model of the tower in BIG’s conference room, Libeskind inspected how Ingels’s diagonal columns in the lobby successfully navigated the constraints of Foster’s foundation while respecting the pedestrian pathways of the master plan.
Libeskind offered his approval with a decisive slap on the table. "Congratulations, that is a super building," he said, while adding a characteristically cautionary note about the turbulent road ahead: "Between that first smile and the last stone is the challenge of architecture."
As BIG continued to expand—growing to 170 employees in New York and 100 in Copenhagen—Ingels balanced multiple high-profile projects simultaneously, from urban waterfront pavilions to a soaring 1,200-foot Manhattan skyscraper. Despite the immense commercial pressures and inevitable compromises, he remained energized by the sheer complexity of his work.
"A lot of starchitects have started their careers doing some high-end sculptural projects," Ingels reflected. "When they suddenly get faced with something that is more governed by the parameters of the practical, they end up almost petrified or paralyzed, because their usual repertoire doesn’t work."
For Ingels, the ultimate goal remained clear: mastering the intricate equation of modern urban development, bending rigid parameters, and turning ambitious fiction into enduring architectural fact.
